Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Arizona's Immigration Law Creates A Police State For Immigrants In Order To Solve A Drug-war Problem

Have you noticed how the people who defend Arizona's new police-state
immigration law constantly conflate the issue of illegal immigration
with drug-related violence?

Indeed, the entire rationale we're hearing from Arizonans for why
they passed this law points to incidents and issues arising not from
illegal immigration, but from the activities of Mexican drug cartels
along the border.

It happened again yesterday on Your World with Neil Cavuto
on Fox News. Cavuto hosted two Arizonans eager to defend their state's
honor from the threat of boycotts -- Phoenix city councilman Sal
DiCiccio, and Barry Broome from the Greater Phoenix Economic Council.
Broome, it's worth noting, was threatening retaliation if people
organize boycotts against Arizona. (Ooooooh. We're quaking, dude.)

But it was DiCiccio -- predictably, a right-wing Republican -- who conflated drug-war problems with immigration issues:

DiCiccio: You know, if you look at what's happening in
the state of Arizona -- I really want to talk about this, this is more a
plea to the national audience -- they need to take a look at what's
happening in our state. In the city of Phoenix alone, the area that I
control along with the other members of the council and the mayor, but
we have a responsibility to protect our citizenry. We had over 350
kidnappings in the city of Phoenix alone, primarily due to the illegal immigrant trade.

But, while human smugglers have been part of Phoenix's kidnapping scene, according to Phoenix police, the vast majority of these kidnappings have been related to Mexican drug cartels.
Illegal immigrants, as the L.A. Times story explains, often are drawn
into kidnapping work on behalf of the cartels -- but the violence is a
result of their employer's line of work, not the fact that they are
immigrants.

Nonetheless, the Right -- embodied by Fox News
-- consistently described his killer as an "illegal immigrant" -- even
though the man was not crossing the border to emigrate, but to enable
drug crossings on the border.

In other words, the Krentz case was not about illegal immigration,
but drug smuggling across the border. The issues, as we've seen are not
entirely separate: the cartels and human smugglers work hand in glove to
control the trails over the border.

But the power and violence of Mexican drug cartels is not related to
illegal immigration. It is related to our misbegotten drug laws, and the
fact that the Mexican government is in an ongoing war getting control
of heavily armed thugs who obtain their money and weapons through the
sale of illicit drugs, largely to American consumers.

If Arizonans were serious about dealing with the crime wave they're
seeing, they'd be pushing for marijuana-decriminalization laws, or some
other more sane approach that actually tackles the core of the problem.

Instead, they're passing laws that try to tackle drug-war problems by attacking illegal immigrants,
who represent a tertiary scapegoat at best. In the process, they're
turning Arizona into a police state for Latinos, citizens and immigrants
alike, who now must carry "their papers" proving their citizenship with
them at all times, or run the risk of being swept up in a Kafkaesque
law-enforcement nightmare.

Performances like DiCiccio's and Moore's do little to dissuade people
that something is amiss in Arizona. Indeed, they just give us all the
more reason to boycott them.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.